The plight of Chinese Muslim detainees who have been held at Guantánamo Bay took another twist today after it emerged that four of them have been resettled in Bermuda.

The men are part of a group of Chinese nationals captured by the US in Afghanistan but found not to be enemy combatants four years ago.

Bermuda's prime minister, Ewart Brown, said the men would be allowed to live in the self-governing British territory, first as refugees. Brown said they would be allowed to pursue citizenship and would have the right to work, travel and "potentially settle elsewhere".

Brown said negotiations with Washington over taking in the Uighurs began last month and he had no security concerns because the men had been cleared by US courts.

Abdul Nasser, one of the four detainees who landed in Bermuda today, issued a statement through his lawyers, saying: "Growing up under communism we always dreamed of living in peace and working in a free society like this one. Today you have let freedom ring."

It is the first time since 2006 that the US has successfully resettled any of Guantánamo's population of Uighurs.

Earlier in the week the tiny Pacific Island nation of Palau agreed to temporarily take in 17 of the Uighur detainees, who the US government says may face persecution if they are returned to China. The other 13 remain to be released.

The Chinese government today demanded that all 17 men, who have been cleared of terrorism allegations, be returned to China.

Palau's president, Johnson Toribiong, said the Uighurs had become "international vagabonds" who deserved his country's age-old tradition of hospitality.

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said the US should "stop handing over terrorist suspects to any third country, so as to expatriate them to China at an early date". He did not say if China would take any action.

Palau, a former US territory, is one of a handful of countries that does not recognise China, instead recognising Taiwan.

Toribiong said Palau did not consider China's reaction when it accepted the US request to temporarily resettle the detainees, who were captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001. The Obama administration faced fierce congressional opposition to allowing the men to be released on to US soil and sought alternatives abroad.

The US has said it fears the men would be executed if they returned to China.

Toribiong said the Uighur detainees from China's arid west would start their new lives in a halfway house to see how they acclimatised to his tropical archipelago east of the Philippines. He called Palau a "Christian nation" but with a 450-member Muslim community.

Toribiong said his country agreed to accept the Uighur detainees because "they have become basically homeless and need to find a place of refuge and freedom".